The sure swing of poetry tied to tradition

"Poetry ... takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility," William Wordsworth once declared, creating a watchword for generations of poets. Sylva Fischerová's poetry takes origin from a different source. The poems featured in The Swing in the Middle of Chaos, a recently released volume of selected poems in English translation, are rooted in chaos, and do not seek to distance themselves from intellectual uncertainty or emotional experience.

Throughout the book, Fischerová expresses a resigned awareness of time's ravages and a willingness to explore the imperfections of language, or as she phrases it, "the bloody dream of words." A trained classicist who teaches at Charles University, Fischerová possesses a formidable arsenal of historical, religious and mythical knowledge, which provides the centerpiece of many of her poems, and her poetry is most effective when it anchors philosophy and history to hard and fast, familiar objects.

The poem "Eggs, Newspaper and Coffee" begins with quotidian tangibles before leaping to myth, philosophy and religion - Fischerová's true poetic territory.

Eggs, newspaper, and coffee

are the first lie of the world,

saying that it's

                     in order.

What order, while the whoredoms

of Jezebel, your mother,

and her witchcrafts are many?

said Jehu to King Horam [?]

For readers uninitiated into the niceties of biblical allusions, associative leaps from breakfast to Jezebel may seem too swift, as if Fischerová is leaving more familiar - and in some cases, more interesting - territory in pursuit of arcane knowledge and illusive allusion. For the record, Jezebel was a Phoenician princess whose life-and-death story is narrated in the Old Testament's Book of Kings. By employing such relative obscurity, the poet risks alienating readers who feel that ignorance inhibits their appreciation of the poem. Fortunately, Fischerová is usually able to balance on the border of benign and malignant ambiguity by veering between abstract references and immediate imagery.

Several poems in The Swing in the Middle of Chaos begin with a striking declarative statement, like: "Genius is a sowed heart of nature," or "Sorrow only dies from greater sorrow," and proceed by rhetorical turns from there. But Fischerová is also capable of radiant imagery, as in the poem "A Beach in Nabeul, Africa," in which she describes seaweed washed onshore as "chocolate fettuccine."

Fischerová only rarely turns her gaze inward to address personal topics, but when she does, the results are fiercely emotional, eschewing rhetoric for direct statement. "All Souls," which describes the narrator's visit to her father's grave on the Feast of All Souls, ends with a prayer:

[?] and I pray to You, God:

Let me go through November again

   to the cemetery kiosks,

hand in hand with mother, because father

isn't here, we're bringing him

flowers and wreath, the heart's antechambers [?]

Most traditional poems end with a lift into lyricism, an attempt to transcend the boundaries of subjectivity and reach toward wisdom, emotional resonance or insight. Poets have a variety of tools with which to achieve this, from rhyme and meter to exclamatory rhetoric. Fischerová most often relies on references to myth, history and classical literature, which - in her most successful poems - heighten her lyrical narratives to pinnacles of meaning. "All Souls" is one of the few purely narrative poems in the book, in which Fischerová achieves lyricism while telling a (somewhat) straightforward story.

Few readers will understand all the references in The Swing in the Middle of Chaos, but perhaps that is intended, and in any case, there is certainly enough emotional and intellectual lucidity in the book for readers to form a personal relationship with Fischerová's poems. Reading through the collection, one begins to believe, with Fischerová, that no matter how chaotic the contemporary world is, life is not much more difficult than it has ever been. The role of poets remains, as always, to live attentively and to forge connections between past, present and future; knowledge, uncertainty and hope.

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com